The modern computing era has brought about a tremendous expansion in the power and storage capacity of computing devices. Many computing devices now include sufficient power and storage capacity to store, view, and manipulate large numbers of high resolution digital images. Additionally, the expansion in wireless and wireline networking as well as network connection speeds allows users to access large libraries of images stored remotely over networks. Digital camera capabilities have also been dramatically improved to allow users to capture of high resolution images that take advantage of the expanded power and storage capacity of modern computing devices. Further, many mobile consumer electronic devices, such as mobile phones, now include integrated digital cameras allowing users to readily capture and store digital images.
Consequently, more and more people use electronic devices comprising digital cameras with great frequency in their everyday lives. Therefore the quantity and the variety of digital images produced by computing devices have greatly increased in recent years and are expected to continue to dramatically increase in the years to come. Some image management techniques have attempted to facilitate management of the vast number of digital images stored by and/or accessible to users. One of the key technologies in image management is image retrieval. The functionality of image retrieval is to provide a user with images related to his request.